Competition

If you join a sporting club, you may find that some of the other players are better at the sport than you are. This is especially true if you are new to it. For a while you will be able to remind yourself of how much more experience they have, and how unreasonable it would be to expect the same of yourself, but soon enough your competitive spirit will kick in, and you will want to be the best, or at least not the worst.

Similarly, you may find that there are some people you know who possess impressive knowledge of music, and without really knowing why, you will attempt to compete with them. This can manifest itself in contests to know the most obscure bands, which are embarrassing for all uninvolved.

Sport, music, politics, art, intelligence, even sex: they are all competitive. You don’t want to be a regular Marxist; you want to be the biggest Marxist, use the best grammar, be the go-to person for a full-body plaster-cast. If someone is having more sex than you, (and this applies disproportionately to people you have dated), then you may find yourself engaging in competition with them, to the sudden confusion of most people you know.

The problem here is that you will always compare yourself to the person who is the best at something you do, and in all of these areas there is someone who has more time for it than you do, or more natural ability. I’m not saying you should give up on trying altogether; that would be pointless. Instead, do what you can do, to the best of your ability, but don’t let it dominate your life. If someone is beating you at World of Warcraft, this is not necessarily a bad thing- you play World of Warcraft and see natural sunlight. You probably have a better balance in your life than all of the people who beat you in individual pursuits.

Unfortunately, having smugly come to the realisation that you are holistically doing better than a whole host of musical obscurity experts and magical internet paladins, you will also realise that it is very difficult to show them how well-rounded you are if they are singleminded enough to devote all of their time to a single pursuit, so revenge is not an option. Instead, settle for the less satisfying, but more healthy, feeling of security that comes with being the jack of all trades; knowing that you can identify The Strokes, put up a tent and discuss economic rationalism competently. Having the right balance is the best thing you could do. That is until you come across someone who has achieved a better balance than you...

Beards and Morality

Beards are tricky. If you admire a man for the mass of hair exhibited upon his chin, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the patchy bits of stubble under your mouth have the potential to attract you admirers of your own, and it’s not necessarily the fault of your dermic extrusions being inadequate.

Growing a beard can lead to problems of style that contain within them nothing short of a moral hazard.

I won’t deny that you have the potential: it’s not just because you have a different hair type to the victorious owner of a fine beard. To suggest that a single hair type applies to all people would be counterintuitive. No, the man you aspire to be takes his formidable ability to generate hair in his stride. He walks a fine line, but has mastered his style. The man you aspire to be is a veteran of facial hair; someone who has successfully managed to forge from his troublesome stubble a glorious mane.

What would you need to do, to obtain this hair, that sits so majestically upon his face? To feel that incredible power? You must make risky choices of style.

The easy option is the study beard. Facing so many challenges to their shaving time, such as playing ultimate frisbee, rolling joints or preempting every line of Napoleon Dynamite with laughter, many students will be economical with their time and their razor blades; they downgrade shaving in their list of priorities, to the same region as taking responsibility for their actions and seeking employment. Not shaving leaves them more time to find the perfect pair of op-shop suspenders, but the fringe benefit should be neither ignored nor taxed.

The study beard has a certain cuteness about, which comes from its innocence. There seems something honest about a beard that has just grown there, free and natural, needing not to be nurtured but independently bringing untold distinction and sexual appeal to its owner.

Obviously it is in the best interests of every man to attempt to tap into this kind of power. But this is where beards meet morality. How can one best fake honesty?

At the beginning of its life cycle, a beard looks like a mistake, as though you have just forgotten to shave. Awkwardness sets in around you, with the realisation that this is an attempt to grow a beard. Everybody will begin imagining what nightmare awaits them all; if Kevin Rudd’s sideburns or Shannon Noll’s facial smut are to be revived and foisted upon them.

With a few weeks of growth, however, those around the beard will begin to see the light. How defined your chin is, how distinguished your mouth, adorned by such carefree perfection. Beware, your joy will be limited.

As the beard lengthens, the degree to which you resemble a homeless person will multiply and the power of the study beard will come under threat. Power corrupts, and feeling the newfound confidence afforded to you by facial hair threatened by the very source of your happiness, there will be the conflicted temptation to maintain a pretend study beard.

A suggested method of keeping this look is to buy an electric razor that will keep a centimetre of hair, but the problem here is inherent to the act of emulating nature. A laboured attempt to grow facial hair to look carefree is no better than paying $400 for a pair of jeans that have been slashed and faded artificially. Such a beard is effectively lying to every person that sees you.

This raises the option of choosing a style, and with that choice comes an even more complex set of moral hazards: Will your beard be an expression of class?; what is wrong with looking homeless, and why does homelessness have a look anyway?; are beard purist snobs just too afraid to attempt a style?; does your goatee make you look like a rapist? (it probably does); does a John Butler beard constitute a moral crime? (yes).

The practical difficulties will be no less challenging. You began the beard with the misguided presumption that you could trust your facial hair to be consistent over time. However, the cruel irony that the more you shave, the heavier it keeps coming back is matched equally by a reduction of growth in response to less frequent shaves. If your choice is to grow repeated study beards, you will find yourself in the awkward stubble-plus phase for longer than you feel comfortable; if you want a colonial-style juggernaut of facial hair, you will almost certainly be thwarted by your suddenly coy dermis’ refusal to extrude hair.

When you threw the razor away, you took a bigger risk than you can imagine. You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into. It might be best to re-schedule ultimate frisbee and get some razors before you visit the horrors of the handlebar mustache on the world.